Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 by Antony Beevor, Artemis Cooper Page A

A rising, largely inspired by the Communists, had begun in Paris. The Allied armies were in no position to come to its support. For de Gaulle, an insurrection was symbolically vital to demonstrate that the liberation of France was not purely an American operation. But at the same time he knew that for the Communists it was a deliberate part of their strategy, creating the opportunity to seize power before his own representatives could assert themselves.
    On 15 August, the decision of the German authorities to disarm part of the Paris police force provoked a strike. News of the landings on the Mediterranean coast round Saint-Tropez was announced on the radio at noon and strengthened resolve. The Communists, who wanted to increase the pressure towards an uprising, had begun to infiltrate and recruit among the police as rapidly as possible. Since many policemen were embarrassed at their record of subservience to German orders, a Communist Party card offered a good insurance policy. The same day, a call for ‘
l’insurrection populaire
’ appeared in
L’Humanité,
the party newspaper.
    Two days later the National Council of the Resistance and the COMAC (Comité Militaire d’Action) debated the call to arms. Although presided over by Georges Bidault, a Christian Democrat, the National Council of the Resistance was dominated by the Communists, as was the military committee. The twenty-nine-year-old Gaullist Resistance chief, General Jacques Chaban-Delmas, had returned from London the day before, having accomplished the last part of the journey through the German lines on a bicycle. The purpose of his clandestine journey had been to warn the Allies that a premature insurrection in Paris was inevitable. Yet he returned with the vain instruction from General Koenig, de Gaulle’s chief of staff, that there was to be no uprising without his order. Koenig had been appointed commander of all the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI), known both affectionately and disparagingly as ‘
les fifis
’, but so far his authority was purely theoretical.
    Chaban-Delmas had told the military authorities in London that against the 16,000-strong German garrison, which might be reinforced by another division, the Resistance in Paris had fewer than 15,000 FFI volunteers and only enough weapons for 2,000. Even that seems an optimistic figure. The best the Resistance in Paris could hope for were some army rifles hidden since 1940, shotguns and revolvers often stolen from arms shops, a few sub-machine-guns parachuted elsewhere in France by the Allies and weapons taken from the Germans by force. A Communist youth group in the 18th
arrondissement,
for example, used to send their female comrades to pick up German soldiers round Pigalle, then entice them into an alley, where young male comrades were waiting to club them down and take their weapons.
    A group of Communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) also managed to seize a ton of explosive from the Poudrerie Sevran. But very few of the volunteers had much experience either of the army or of the Resistance. Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, the Communist who commanded the FFI of Greater Paris, admitted to Louis Teuléry, a major in the Service B (the Communist counter-intelligence service) that the Communist FTP had numbered only 600 men in the whole of the Greater Paris area before the Normandy landings. The real rush to join came afterwards.
    Thirty-five young resistants fell headlong into a trap when they were promised a consignment of weapons by an
agent provocateur
working for the Gestapo. When they arrived at the rendezvous they were rounded up, brutally interrogated at Gestapo headquarters in the rue des Saussaies, and executed.
    Yet Colonel Rol-Tanguy was unimpressed by calls for caution. That day the FTP gave the order to seize vehicles and prepare them with armour-plating, as if Paris in 1944 was comparable to Madrid or Barcelona in July 1936. The following day, flyposters across the city